You'll love this game...

http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/

Let me put it this way. If there were a spell that did absolutely nothing except put a dunce cap icon next to a character's name, I would want a way to remove it. The fact that it has no effect on gameplay does not matter to me. It makes the character look stupid.

If you want a hardcore mode where there are no Remove Curse or Healing spells, that should be at most a checkbox that you can tick off, not the standard gameplay.

The game is what the game is. Next people will want a pink elephant box, if they don't want pink elephants they can untick the box. Don't like cities? Untick the box. What about a game without a sovereign? Untick the box. Don't like your computer? Smash it.

Yeah, I understand what your saying. There are things in games that annoy me too, and I wish they could be changed. But thats all part of game evolution, its those little differences that make each game unique and each special in their own little way. At least ease of modding is becoming the norm.

Well OK sir. Let me tackle your problem head on. You don't like it? You have a choice: minimize exposure to your pretender, or use your pretender wisely. If you can't stand having control over a part of the game, then either mod it out or don't buy the game. I think that having permanent consequences adds a little bit of unexpectedness and strategy to the game, myself.

If it was severely unbalancing, I'd agree with you. But I just don't see the problem. It sounds to me like you can't handle the frustration of having bad things happen to your characters.

We are all so used to having our dispel magic and remove curse and raise dead and resurrection spells that the idea of a permanent effect spell is damn near unthinkable. TBH, i don't think other channelers or units should be able to inflict permanent effects on you. However, i think quests should. For some high level quests, you should be forced to make choices that will really effect you in a personal way.

Or they could just be horrible moral choices. The Ultima series was always good for that sort of thing. There were numerous moral choices that had so much gray dripping from them i am amazed my keyboard wasn't soaked.

I would prefer that not have to be the case with Elemental. That's why I don't want the same kind of ridiculous mechanics tainting the game (Hence the thread.) I don't want another Dominions game.

Its like this. I can make a special game myself, i would prefer one that is fun though.

Most people are too used to having their decisions wrapped up in cotton wool by games, you just have to learn to think in a new way, make a paradigm shift.

A lot of the ranting in this thread is akin to complaining that your pawns can't move backwards in chess. Dominions is what it is, a lot of people enjoy it like that, it's not a terrible game just because YOU don't like it.

Most of the stuff you are complaining about wasn't in the Dominions 3 demo. So I highly doubt you will buy Elemental or any game you don't have to. Why should any developer have to or want to listen to non-paying customers?

Yes, i have. However, i would suggest that many people have not. And go further and say that the genre is not popular with the majority of gamers. Can you think of any recent games that fit the genre and were decently popular? torchlight perhaps? titan quest? those feel much more action rpg though. Rougelikes simply don't show up much anymore, probably because of things like permanent afflictions.

Just because something is less popular doesn't mean it doesn't have merit. In fact, more popular often just means "better marketed", or "appeals to a lower common denominator".

I don't really care about the majority of gamers, and lucky for you Stardock don't either, or they'd be developing Sportsgame2011 or GimmickyPopstarSimulator4.

Both Nethack and DungeonCrawlSS are still under active development, and are still enjoyed by many people btw.

This is slightly adjunct to my argument though (although I don't think I made it very well). Dismissing out of hand a game mechanic that may (or may not) add tremendous strategic and tactical depth to a game purely on the grounds that you're risk averse, and opposed to developing or learning effective counters, is well, silly.

As has been stated, curses and horror marks are primarily psychological tools, and judging from the violent reactions against them here, they obviously work! Dominions is a game with literally hundreds of strategies (I'm not kidding) at your disposal, horror marks and curses stop (nay, inconvenience) roughly... one, maybe two. So you'll have to forgive veterans (of which I'm not) for being slightly dismissive of anyone who makes such a big deal out of them as to make an ALLCAPS post on an unrelated message board

Sorry for the wall of text, I can be a little verbose at times.

Popular may not be an absolute indicator of whether or not something is good, but it at least gives a clue. Unpopular is usually unpopular for a reason. Thank god for stardock giving a raspberry to sportsgames. And having something still under development means only that there is at least 1 person who can program, likes the game, and has free time. Checking sourceforge, nethack has 1.3 million downloads for thier newest version, so that does say something.

It is also difficult to actually tell just how much of an effect these sorts of things have, since we only seem to have 2 groups. One that says permanent effects are pure evil and ruins games when they are not eating babys. And the other group saying that says they are fine because they don't change anything anyway.

So, if these things annoy a ton of people, and don't actually do anything, whats the point?

Add permanent effect spells. Add a spell that can remove them. Add a checkbox in menu when you start a game to enable/disable the removal spell. Everyone is happy.

have you played civ4 recently? there are like 4 menu pages when you start a game, each with dozens of options, sliders, drop down menus, lists of checkboxs. One of them has an option for no settlers built, and another for only one city. I think we have hit the equivlent of a pink elephant already and blown right past it.

Alot of people like the One City Challenge in Civ. I have not played without settlers before but I guess that option is there for the scenarios people make.

Civ IV is ok, I havn't smashed my computer yet

Have you ever played Dominions?

It's possible to build an incredibly powerful pretender god, that you can use from turn 1 to rampage all over pretty much anything (they call them supercombatants). I don't see the OP complaining about those...

Although they have other uses, curses and horrormarks are primarily used to counter these supercombatants, because the threat of permanently afflicting this super unit is sometimes enough to prevent it being commited in battle.

Of course some people don't really care, and will commit it anyway, in the knowledge that an advantage early often compounds later in the game... they see the price worth paying. Because horror marks build up in strength through the game, they only really get crippling towards the end, if they ever do at all.

Other people commit because they have options available to deal with them, so don't see them as a threat.

Others... don't make supercombatant pretender gods in the first place, instead going a different route.

Like I said, the OP gives the impression that he was not prepared to learn the game. These permanent afflictions really do add a lot of depth to Dominions, and of the multitude of things that game gets wrong, they aren't one of them IMO.

No, haven't played dominions, or i would have a clear-cut opinion. However, from everything said, i am beginning to think that permanent status effect would not be so terrible if properly done and balanced, which i suspect SD can do. Still think the best option would be to just provide a checkbox to have/not-have them. If no checkbox, i would prefer to not have them.

TBH though, i am sure the devs can handle it in an insightful and clever way that makes everyone happy.(no pressure)

I'm not saying it shouldn't be an option, but I encourage everyone to at least try the "hard" route. A lot of the features in games we usually think of as restricting actually make the game a lot more fun. When I first had my pretender horror marked and cursed in Dominions, I said to myself: "Fuck this!" and quit when I couldn't remove it. Ultimately, I found horror marks and curses are interesting enough where even if I was given the option to make them removable, I wouldn't take it.

You can save scum Linley's Dungeon Crawl until you win... but that isn't "the spirit of the game", so to speak.

Challenges are what make games fun!

I completely disagree.  There was a very low chance to get cursed and or marked in domions three.  If you played intelligently and didn't abuse (read, try to win with your 'god' every battle, rarely do you get marked. Even in multiplayer games which I played extensively.  They were included to prevent you from ever being omgwtfbbq i can do/go anywhere with impunity status.  There should be some things you can't 'fix' you should always have to play with sensibility , I'm xxx level with xxx items with xxx army so i'll just brainlessly go about my business or, I've stacked my god/avatar with super items so I'm going to cheese through an AI without even bothering to bring an army.  You should -always- be able to be countered, and that was a counter for overuse of your avatar or stupidly trying to solo armies with it.

If you played sensibly, used other large units/generals when you attacked with your god, paid attention to where you sent your armies or what armies could reach you there was no reason you'd ever get your diety marked in Dominions 3.  Don't blame the mechanic, blame your lack of foresight to counter it easily and effectively.

Your post reminds me of one of my friends that rage quit and refuse to play diablo 2, because when he melee'd a lightning enchanted monster lightning would shoot out and kill him.  Well duh, and he would say 'well i can't do anything about it, i'm melee!!'.  Thats not true you could get magic resistance as well (just like you can in Dom 3)  You can avoid it (just like you can in dom 3) pay attention, not EVERY mob is Lightening enchanted (Just like the majority can't curse/mark in dom 3).  Plan strategically and you getting marked / insanity / cursed would be a abnormal event even in a long game.

The original poster misses the point completely. The horror marks and curses are... a gamebalancing factor. They mitigate the snowball effect of gaining experience and equipment on a supercombatant that may become nearly indestructible later, thus breaking the game. Curses and marks are not accessible to anyone - cures may be a level 1 spell, but you must have both lvl 1 nature and astral, and that's not so common. I actually like how in Dominions various features balance each other out. Dominions 3 is a MP game primarily - it's not about steamrolling a stupid AI with your lvl 56 magic user, it's about optimizing the efficiency of resource usage and devising various battle strategies that can invalidate each other. It's a game of many facets and looking at only one can only miss the whole picture.

Piggy-backing on Kamamura, it's worth noting too that the level of a spell in Dominions is not the sole determinate of its usefulness or power.  Dominions has a massive spell book, and the combinations of spells with nations, spells with troops, spells with mages, spells with other spells, and so on mean that there are far more "game breaking" things you can do than cast horror marks or curses on everything.  Indeed, sometimes that would be a total waste of valuable casting turns.

Take Abysia, for example...  Not only do they benefit from living in hotter climes, they have a unique spell at level 5 of the Enchantment tree that is more useful and powerful than many of the higher up spells on the same tree.  How more useful?  Because it makes the troops that already radiate heat even radiate even more heat.  Throw in the Enchantment 6 spell "heat from Hell," which causes the whole battle field (and not just particular troops) to increase in heat, and Abysia would be foolish to waste time casing horror marks against an SC when, instead, they can just exhaust it and kill it once it passes out.

Unless, of course, said SC has a bunch of reinvigoration and fire resistance...

And that's just one example.  There are literally hundreds of useful spells in Dominions, and thousands of combinations of spells, many of which could be considered game breaking.  Except, there's always a response.  Now, there may not be a magical response to horror marks, but there is a tactical and strategic one: don't commit your pretender to a battle where he or she is likely to get horror marked.  Or use that mind hunt spell that lets you kill astral mages (the ones that cast horror marks) without meeting them on the battle field.  Or send assassins to wipe out their mages before you fight them normally.  Or...  See, there's always another option in Dominions.

The argument as to whether Elemental should have permanent status afflictions is an interesting one, but pointing to Dominions 3 as an example of where that doesn't work is foolish.  If Fallen Enchantress does even half as well as Dominions 3 in magic, strategy and counter strategy, and pretender/sovereign design, I'll be thrilled.

To pyramid on Kamamura and Emerson, it should be noted that while horror marks and curses are permanent, neither one is a game breaker.

A Curse can't be cured, but the only effect a curse has is to increase the chance of developing an affliction when wounded. There are numerous items and spells that already reduce affliction chance (thereby countering the curse) and a half-dozen (or slightly more) ways to cure afflictions once they're suffered. It's easily countered, and in most cases outright ignored.

A Horror mark is more dangerous, but though it is a death sentence, it's a slow one. A horror mark has, what, a 2% chance of summoning a horror to attack the bearer each round? Each horror attack should increase the number of horror marks, and thus the chance and strength of the next attack, but it is a process that starts quite slowly.

Add to that the fact that many spells to summon horrors have the built in danger of marking the caster, or a chance the horror will attack friendly troops instead... These are also, despite how deadly they seem, some of the least useful spells in the game. Cast horror marks in any sort of pitched battle is simply a waste of your time when any other two-bit spell will have an immediate and often more powerful affect. Gift of Haven, which will outright kill a dozen troops, or Horror Mark, which might show results in 20-50 turns? I know which I would rather use.

As has been stated above me, horror marks are in place to act as a counter to a much more dangerous and game changing aspect: SCs. It's one of the few counters available when you're too far behind to field your own SC or a large communion. And even then, it's a slow death, a ticking clock. It's a cold comfort, knowing that the enemy's Prince of Death or Earth King will die sometime within a hundred turns, when he's still cutting a swath through your troops and gobbling up territory.

I understand that some people can't stand that sort of asymmetrical gameplay, just as some of us love it, and that's fine. But implying that Dominions 3 was badly designed or badly developed because you don't like an aspect of it is, frankly, laughable.

I would say that people are spoiled by today's games. Everything is reversible - injury, affliction, even death. In a real combat you can lose a limb in a second, which leaves you crippled for the rest of your life (if you survive the trauma). Even injuries can take month, even years to heal. I say the culprit is D&D with all the endless potions of healing and scrolls of ressurections, that make an injury just a nuissance.

Holy thread necromancy! Does anybody talk about anything other then Dominions 3 lately?

In real combat you also can't sit around for 3 hours figuring out what plans you want to execute on your next turn. The enemy doesn't wait for you, and everything is realtime. Now I can say that gamers are spoiled because turn based games are so easy and unrealistic.

Horror marks can also be used as a deterrent.

"Yes, if you attack me you can steamroll me right now, but I will horror mark and curse every unit that I can. I might lose, but you will suffer later. Why don't you attack someone else instead?"

Permanent statuses work in Dominions. I do not know if they would work as well in Elemental. They are completely different games with very different appeal, despite the fact that they are both Fantasy-Strategy games. To make an argument that permanent status effects should not be in Elemental is not the same as arguing that they do not belong in games at all. Some people like games with permanent effects and ironman, and some do not. The wonderful thing is that both types of games can exist, and you, the player (consumer) can choose which ones you want to play or not. It is not necessary for developers to add in features that do not appeal to their target audience. In fact, I applaud developers who are not too willing to compromise their vision and dilute their product.